Like Ice
by Reyairia
Summary: Despite his bitterness, his rudeness towards her, his near uselessness, she has loved him, cared for him, given his life new meaning. It is so illogical, so beyond his comprehension, so challenging to everything he has ever believed in, but Liara has always been that, hasn't she? Collection of drabbles and oneshots. Not in chronological order.
1. Irritation

Javik cannot quite understand why it bothers him so much.

At first he could not care less, the more time she spent fawning over the commander the less time she did badgering him, but now as he leans against the cold metal wall, arms crossed and solemnly watching as the asari speaks with the commander – her pheromones strong-smelling enough to whiff them at this distance, and her hips moving in such a way that was communicable to all species as a sign of attraction – Javik finds himself gritting his teeth and wondering why he bothered to leave his quarters. But he doesn't go back, he stays there, festering in irritation at the asari's behavior and why it seems to be affecting him in such a manner.

He convinces himself that it's because she has potential, and he can see that in her, and that she's being hindered by her ridiculous one-sided affections for Shepard, but he knows that it's a falsehood. The commander is in a relationship and if anything she fights harder with her mate by her side, and he can see the asari isn't any different in the battlefield, putting extra effort when the commander is watching her.

Javik won't admit it, and it will be a long time before he does, but he himself fights a bit better, a bit harder, when the doctor is around to argue with him. For now he shakes the thought out of his head that against the light, Liara's silhouette looks just slightly prothean.


	2. Aethyta

"And, well… that's how it is now." Liara leaned on her arm, then rubbed it with the palm of her hand. It wasn't as if her father wouldn't believe her, she would, but it was never an easy conversation to have.

"So let me get this straight…" Aethyta didn't bother to look up, focusing on cleaning a turian glass with a small, white cloth. "You dug up some popsicle prothean out of the ground… and now you want to bang him?"

Liara rubbed the bridge of her nose with her fingers in annoyance, and in an effort to hide her blush. "Do you have to be so crude? Look, I know it's a bit hard to take in…" She removed her hand from her face and sighed as her voice trailed off.

"You tellin' me?" The older asari finished with the glass, and grabbed another cloth to clean the counter. "And here I was thinking there was something between you and the Commander."

"You weren't totally off," Liara crossed her arms, taking the time to sit down on one of the stools. "But it was one-sided on my part, that isn't - surprisingly - the case with Javik." Her fingers trailed circles on the layer of soap overlaying the counter in thought. "He was just… hard to read. He's been through a lot."

"Uh-huh, yeah," Aethyta nodded. "Losing your entire species, waking up fifty thousand years later, I'm not sure I'd be quite all there myself."

"Yes…" Liara stopped her fingers, then looked up at her father. "Could I have a drink? The usual, of course."

"Right away, babe."

There was a couple of moments of silence between them, the chatter of the bar and the clinking of glass in the background filling in for conversation while Aethyta concentrated on a problem spot and Liara focused on the glass, swishing the liquid around absent-mindedly.

"So…" Aethyta finally started, breaking the awkward quiet between them as Liara pressed the glass to her lips. "Does he have a nice ass?

… Hey I just finished cleaning!"


	3. Peace

Liara was utterly exhausted, barely able to keep her eyes open, yet she couldn't go back to sleep. Tossing and turning didn't aid her, and being alone with only cool sheets for company certainly wasn't helping.

She was used to waking up alone, Javik was a poor sleeper and it was rare for him to be there in the morning, but gazing at the bedside clock told her it was very early even for him.

Less than a day ago she had given birth, she deserved her rest, but as Liara turned once again to see the empty space beside her, she sighed in defeat. _Might as well_, she thought. She stumbled out of the bed, leaning against the wall for support, and pressed at a switch that illuminated the floor with many tiny little lights. It was worth getting that upgrade, letting her see without the sting in her eyes that came from outright turning the lights on. Grabbing her favorite plush robe from her wardrobe, Liara tossed it on and set out of the room to see where her bondmate had gone to.

She had a feeling she'd find him there, his silhouette standing out against dark beside Janiri's crib. Javik was very still, the only movement being his fingers stroking the cheek of the tiny baby. It was a sight that took Liara's breath away, as little as she can make out of it at first.

"You should be resting," he said softly, not bothering to look up. Liara ignored his words, and slowly treaded to the opposite side of the crib to join him.

"Perhaps if you didn't leave your bondmate all cold and alone, she would be asleep," she playfully jabbed back, and Javik only huffed in response.

Both of them were silent, completely unmoving except for Javik's little touchings on the bridge of the nose of his daughter. _My daughter_, he kept thinking to himself, but it didn't take away from how surreal it was. It was still dawning on him that this little creature was his. "My daughter," Javik whispered out loud, still as confused as he's ever been. He, who had never known anything but reapers, death, destruction and how to kill, and yet… _and yet_… there was this tiny little life he had helped _create_. It was so strange, so _alien_, and a feeling hummed in his chest that he could not quite describe.

"Yes," Liara whispered. "Your daughter." But Javik was powerless in taking his eyes off Janiri, unable to concentrate on anything but how her chest rose and fell with her small breaths. For a few moments, he said nothing.

"At the end of the war," he started, the tips of his fingers finding their way down the baby's face and into her small curled hand. Everything about Janiri was so small and fragile, but her blissful face showed no signs of awareness of this fact. "I told the commander I looked forward to seeing what peace looked like."

Javik knew now, he was looking right at it, at his daughter. Peace was knowing that there would be no Reapers to take her away from him like they had taken so much before. It was a strange sensation, and he felt… oddly afraid, but it was also warm and tender and inviting.

Liara's gentle hand on his shoulder snapped him out of his trance, and he turned his face to hers as she spoke.

"Would you like to take her to bed with us, just for tonight?"

Javik hesitated a little, his eyes darting nervously between Liara and Janiri, but he ultimately replied.

"… Yes."


	4. Tali

Tali is the first to notice.

It isn't easy to read Javik, a century of fighting against reapers and indoctrination made sure he would hide whatever emotion he could bring himself to feel, but between his more quarian-like anatomy and growing up in a society where people hid their faces behind masks, Tali can pick him up just fine from the rare occasions he does venture out of the Port Cargo. She can see how his eyes soften when he spots Liara, how his back straightens up just slightly, how he leans on the leg closest to her direction. It was clear to her as soon as she started to pay a little bit of attention.

Yes, she, Tali'Zorah vas Rannoch, or vas Normandy or whatever, had found the grumpy prothean's secret little soft spot.

"Sheparr… do you think… do you think that Javik likes Liara… like, like likes her?"

The commander just replies with a laugh and a head shake, before pouring another glass. "You are even more drunk than I thought, Tali."

"Noo… I think… I think he doeees." Ugh this… straw… was getting more and more difficult to aim. Stupid thing. Stupid straw. Stupid Shepard.

"It's practically a hazard to bring them on missions together." Shepard leans an arm on a counter, laughing about the last time that happened. "Almost too busy arguing with each other to actually fight, though they do make a good team once they shut up."

"And that… and that d-doesn't remiiind you of aaaanybody else?" Tali giggles, even with her blurred eyesight she can make out Shepard putting the glass down, eyes widening at the realization. Joker and EDI had been the exact same way too at first. Maybe Tali was right.

"You've got a point, but I'm still not quite buying it," The commander says, finally taking a sip of the liquor poured in earlier.

"I'll-I'll prove it to you," The quarian retorts before pushing the buttons on her omnitool to set up the comm link. It takes her three drunken attempts and one confused EDI before she finally gets the right number to Javik's quarters.

"I have _got_ to see this," Shepard snickers, hurriedly jumping off the bar stool and rushing out of the room.

"What is it, quarian?" Javik's accented voice hissed through the speakers, likely upset at having his very important brooding interrupted.

"So I heard about your talk with Liara…"


	5. Illness

Gonna reply to my reviewers cause I'm not sure if everyone checks their inbox hehe

Pendragon22: Actually I always thought it was the opposite, that it was Javik who had one-sided feelings for Liara, since Liara is still a bit skeptical of him towards the end and I'm pretty sure is in love with Shepard regardless whether if romanced or not. Meanwhile Javik does all but explicitly care about her, and Tali points this out.

Sharrukin: lmao you should see me on tumblr. I've written paragraphs on why this ship makes so much sense. The fact that it heavily parallels the Joker/EDI relationship in the second game is just the start for the reasoning behind it. The ship is more popular there than on here though, that's for sure. Part of the reason why I decided to add these here was because I felt there was an extreme lack of it on this side of the fandom.

* * *

Javik was ill often, and he _hated_ it.

"Well what did you _expect_, Mr. Javik?" The salarian huffed while poking at his omnitool with a little too much force, ignoring the beyond upset look on the prothean's face. "Fifty thousand years is a long time for viruses and bacteria to evolve and emerge. Your immune system is grossly out of date." The doctor continued rambling like the salarian he was as Javik bore a hole in the ceiling with a glare, silently cursing the microbe that dared put him in this position. "You are lucky I have background in both viruses and genetics and experience working on small sample sizes, else you would have been dead twice over by now. Fortunately, your physiology is similar to that of a Quarian's, and they have no shortage of immune system boosters. Speaking of which-"

"I would rather be _dead,_" Javik spat, before swearing and clawing at his face as his migraine intensified. He had fallen low enough without having to depend on AI, _synthetics_, for aid.

"Suit yourself," the doctor spat back, packing up the medkit made for this specialized client in a hurried manner that clanged the metal inside together and made Javik's headache worse. He was absolutely sure he did that on purpose, but Javik had no energy to complain. "Now I have to get back to patients that actually thank me when I save their lives."

Javik heard his stomps to the exit of the room, and as the doors swished open could pick up Liara's scent and tender voice making their way to him. He suddenly remembered the other reason he hated being ill.

"Will he be all right?"

"Yes, yes, nothing too serious." The salarian doctor waved his hand in the air in a dismissive manner. "But he'll likely be bedridden for another week. Make sure he eats this time."

"Thank you, doctor Maelon," Liara bowed her head slightly, before turning to look at the grumbling prothean on the bed. "I know he isn't the easiest patient to treat."

"That would be an understatement." Maelon huffed, and was quickly out of sight.

There were a few moments of silence, Liara making sure that the grumpy salarian doctor was gone before speaking up.

"I don't understand why Maelon of all doctors, Javik." She said quietly, approaching him. "He doesn't exactly have the best record."

"The reasons you doubt him are the reasons I don't." He responded weakly. Javik would have added the fact that Liara had blackmail material against him, but he found himself losing his voice, and his vision had started to blur. He squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again, but it did not help.

"Well he had good advice," Liara delicately placed the large glass of water she had been holding on the nightstand next to the bed. "You do need to get some rest."

That was the other reason he hated being ill, because it became obvious how much he depended on the asari for even day-to-day activities, transitioning into this cycle.

Javik wanted to snap back about how he didn't exactly have much of a choice, that he was stuck in bed for too much time because this cycle's primitive medicine didn't know how to fix him, that back in his cycle he would have been, _should_ have been, dead. But against his will his mind starts to slip and, soon enough, goes white and then dark.

"I'll come back later with some food, is that all right with you, Javik? … Javik?" Liara curiously poked at the top of his head. Asleep. He was sick often, but strangely enough she had never been able to catch him sleeping. He looked strangely peaceful, different than when she had opened his pod back on Eden Prime. She absent-mindedly ran the tips of three fingers down his crest, noting the slight bump that separated each segment, before snapping her arm back as she realized what she was doing.

Perhaps she was catching something too.


	6. Simple

"How long…?"

It's a simple question born out of simple curiosity. Javik had been so numbing of himself to emotions – or perhaps those sorts of things were communicated more through pheromones that she could not pick up – that Liara never really figured out when he started to return her feelings. It was a… surprise when he kissed her that first time. Her sight drops down to her hands, which she wrings together with all five of her slender fingers.

It's a question that gives Javik pause, but he replies with a shrug of his shoulders and a curt "Why does it matter?" It doesn't matter now, now that the Reapers are gone, now that they are together. And perhaps Javik is not quite willing to admit that the correct answer to her question is _Too long._ That even during the war, when he saw her face and heard her voice he was not Avatar of Vengeance, but simply _Javik_.

Even when she herself was still clamoring for the commander's attention.

Liara makes a noise through her nose that is not quite a giggle and grabs his hands, gently bringing them together like a prayer, wrapped up in her own. "No… " Liara says softly, eyeing them before bringing them to her mouth for a kiss. It's such a simple gesture, yet it does not fail to cause Javik's breath to catch in his throat. "It doesn't."

Liara's eyes return to his, and she gives him a smile that spreads the fullness of her lower lip and that he can't quite help but kiss.


	7. PTSD

_It was a horrible war, wasn't it?_

Liara knows this because she finds him in his apartment clad in clinky clean armor, polishing a particle rifle he hasn't had to use. She's crossing her arms and giving him that strange look that mixes pity and worry and peculiarity and combined with the silence says more about him than it does about her. Javik doesn't even bother to look up, he isn't ashamed of his routine of maintaining guns that could be used. He could be attacked at any moment. The reapers could come back.

Liara knows that they are still alive in his mind.

Liara knows that it was a horrible war because the first time he embraces her, he grabs on to her tightly and he buries his face in the curve of her shoulder as if he were some starving varren trying to find a carcass in a pile of dirt. In his mind the reapers are still alive and in his mind she will be gone from him soon, just like everything else. Javik's arms tremble and shake all the way to his elbows and Liara has never seen him so afraid and vulnerable in the many years she's known him. She knows that it was a horrible war because even though she holds him close and strokes the back of his neck with her finger, stroking circles upon cascading circles, Liara knows that as much as she loves him, she will never fully bring him out of the war. She bites her lip with how desperately she wants to say "it's okay," but she knows it's not.

She knows that the reapers are still alive in his mind because of one night when she's drank one dark roasted coffee too many and she wakes up twirled between the sheets as if she had done battle with them. It's some ungodly hour in the morning that has no business existing, but despite that Javik is not at her side. She's never woken up with him next to her but it's an ungodly hour in the morning and she thought that at least she'd be able to see him there as reparations from the sleep that has evaded her. But he's not there, Javik is fighting in the war and Liara knows this because she finds him at the foot of the bed with the particle rifle he hasn't had to use. The reapers still exist and because they still exist he cannot sleep without a gun in his hand and a scowl on his face. They never left and could attack at any moment, they're already harvesting his dreams.

Liara sees the man she loves, loves so dearly, and she knows that he is still fighting reapers and that she cannot do anything to help him but bring him a blanket.

It was a horrible war, but at least he can be warm as he fights it.


	8. Silar

**A/N: All right guys, I tried really hard to somehow spin this into t'sovik, but I was completely unable to. I still think it was worth an upload just to give a little bit of a better idea of my headcanon for Javik's past - and in part why in my drabbles he's so hesitant to start a relationship with Liara.**

**Also, OhSoDeadly I responded to your review, so make sure to check your inbox!**

* * *

"I want to fight under your command," Javik confronts the woman who would eventually become his first bondmate and whose ship would explode with her in it. His eyes are forward and unmoving, when he saw Silar in the battlefield destroying Densorin husks in flashes of green light he thought her skill and grace was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Perhaps it was the only beautiful thing he had ever seen. Javik wanted to fight and die for her.

"You?!" She spat at him. Silar at the time was taller than him, and her stare was venomous. Javik felt like a prey animal, but he kept his composure the best he could. "All you'll do is get us killed." Smelling his nervousness, she knocks on his crest with force, which finally makes him break. Javik holds his head and groans in pain from the blow. "Your chitin is still soft. How old are you?"

"Seventeen," he squeaks out. That was the first and only time Javik would ever lie. He was sixteen.

"You are barely more than a child," the older female scoffs, but he could smell how the realization of seeing such a young soldier was affecting her, the scent of anxiety was one that was easy to pick up. Still, he was not planning on backing down. He was determined to prove his worth to her.

"You are not much older than I am." Javik retaliates, removing his hands from his aching crest. He balls his hands into fists and stares directly into her eyes.

Silar does not respond, and now she too looks like a cornered rodent. Javik was right; Protheans could live hundreds of years. Now, few lived past forty.

She would not be one of them.

* * *

"I will take you to see the Citadel some day," she tells him a year after she first invited him to her quarters. He's spending a few short hours of rest in her arms, their legs still entangled from their mating, when she says those words. It's bizarrely uncharacteristic of Silar, she was a hardened soldier and had likely seen many give such broken promises. He lifts his chin to try to see her face, to try to figure out what she could be thinking, but she's looking up at an imaginary sky above her head. There is nothing but a metal ceiling there.

* * *

Six months later, Javik would be injured and sent to a hospital. It's crowded and it smells of death and desperation and he has to share a room with at least four others. The last thing he can remember is Silar dragging him out of rubble by his feet and green from her biotics. When he wakes up he is here instead of in the battlefield where he belongs. Javik doesn't ask for his bondmate, he knows that Silar is too powerful and skilled of a soldier to go down like a grunt in the battlefield.

Three days later a message confirms his beliefs. Silar's ship was shot down. It didn't matter how skilled of a soldier you were when your ship was struck by a Reaper's laser.

Javik puts the messaging shard down as soon as he finishes reading it. To a stranger he would have seemed unphased. Inside, however, he was screaming. He should have been there. He should have been with Silar, at her side. He should be dead.

Protheans could survive in the vacuum of space for several hours. Her death was not quick or painless. There was no honor in it.

* * *

Fifty-thousand years after Silar's death Javik finds himself drawn to and fascinated by the Citadel, although he can't remember her words or even her face. He knows that at some point he was supposed to be here, but as soon as he lays a foot out of the ship he is overcome with a sense of hopelessness, like he was denied something that should have been his. Javik can't quite understand why, but he finds himself in the embassies, looking out a window and into the sky.

There is nothing but the metal of the Citadel's arms.


	9. Silence

**By the way guys, just to avoid confusion, these oneshots are NOT in chronological order. **

* * *

She's in love with him, Liara realizes, laying wide awake on her bed. She touches her lips with the tips of her fingers where he tenderly kissed her in her dreams – the third time this month. _Goddess_, why, _why _of all people did it have to be _Javik_?

Liara ignores the irony of calling on what she now knows was a prothean woman for help.

She grips at her sheets, pulls them over her head and groans. First it was her hopeless feelings for Shepard, now they had somehow transferred to the most insufferable being in the galaxy, who most certainly would never return them.

* * *

The next time she sees him, she does her very best to not let her thoughts show on her face. It's futile, Liara knows, Javik's vomerolfaction* ensures she won't be able to hide from him, all she can do is pretend her emotions don't exist and hope things don't become even more awkward than they already are.

Javik walks over to her, his bright red armor clicking with every step. It wasn't unusual to run into mercenaries in their expeditions together, and last time they had even run into a slaver who had heard rumors of a living treasure jumping to and from prothean ruins. It did not hurt to be prepared.

"Dr. T'Soni, I've been—"

He stops dead in his tracks as soon as he catches that unmistakable scent of attraction. Was it…? Javik looks around and behind her to see if there could be another source, some other annoying lustful intern standing behind the asari, but there's nobody and it's clear to him the origin of the scent. Yes, he supposed it was possible.

"Yes, Javik?" Liara inquires. Her face shows no sign of embarrassment from being discovered, as if she were unaware of her attraction to him or that he could sense it.

"No, it is nothing." Javik replies. Years ago, when they first met and he still stubbornly called her by her species, he would have pointed it out and chastised and perhaps even ridiculed her for it, but now…

"As I was saying," he clicks at his omnitool, bringing up the notes Liara had sent him the week before. "I discovered a mistranslation in your notes."

Javik decides to stay quiet. It's easier to stay silent than to confront her about her feelings, because that means that as a consequence, he'd have to confront his own.

It's a silence that does not break for fifteen years.

* * *

_*ability to smell pheromones._


	10. Insufferable

_**A/N: remember that I said the rating might go up? Well...**_

* * *

_Javik is perhaps the most insufferable person Liara has ever had the misfortune of meeting._

* * *

"What are you doing?!" Liara ducks back under cover, hissing at the companion beside her.

"Killing reapers," Javik replies as if she was the most stupid creature in existence, briefly looking out to throw a grenade at a clustered group of cannibals.

"Guys…"

"I was setting up a biotic explosion!" Liara snaps at him, how _dare _he think that lowly of her. "If you would have let me I would have taken care of all those cannibals and the brute right next to them!"

"Guys…!"

"It was a reaper. I shot it." Javik's upper lip curls upward and he glares at her, to which she glares back. "Why must you insist on blaming me for your own shortfalls, asari?"

"GUYS!" Javik and Liara turn to look behind them to where Shepard was unsuccessfully trying to fend off two brutes alone, running and jumping into cover. "THE WEDDING CAN WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE MISSION!"

The two biotics look at each other in disgust before reloading their guns with a click.

* * *

"Wrong." Javik says, handing her back the datapad as if it were a dead ratul. There's a very irritating condescending tone in his voice. "Everything about this is wrong."

Liara diverts her attention back to all the research that she knew was now in vain, scanning word by word and biting her lip in frustration. "I spent a year in the Styx Theta cluster coming up with this."

"Clearly not enough time if you thought those were canals."

"But…"

"Dr. T'Soni, I thought you wished to learn about my people," Javik shifts his position and looks away in a bored fashion, "not lie about them."

Liara swears that she sees a small upturn in the corner of his lips, and resists the urge to chuck the datapad at his head.

* * *

She finds herself sitting on the arm of a couch, naked from the waist down, they both are. Liara's hand is grasping the back of Javik's neck and her mind is a blur. She voices her desires by squeezing at his waist with her thighs. _Come on,_ she thinks.

She's a little confused when her partner gently pries her hands from himself, and grips them behind her back, leaving her dependent on him to keep her from falling. Liara is even more perplexed when Javik whispers against her ear cavity.

"Beg."

"Are you s—" Liara gasps out before he lets go of her, letting her fall for a short few moments before catching her and wrestling her back into the earlier position. It's enough to cause the blood to rush to her head and make her slightly dizzy. He's serious.

"I… please…" She mumbles against his neck, before kissing it, "I want you."

That seems to have been enough for Javik, and Liara hisses out a _yes_ as she feels his sex slick against hers … but he surprises her by letting her go again, except this time she feels her body hit the plushness of the couch. First her eyes stare at the ceiling wide in astonishment, and then narrow in anger. He had been toying with her all along.

Javik makes his way around Liara, comfortably taking a seat next to her. "Liara," he chuckles in amusement, and she swivels her hips to place her feet on the ground, taking her time to glare daggers at the prothean. "What sort of man do you think I am?"

"The dead sort." She snarls as she grabs the pillow beside her and stuffs it in his smug face.

* * *

_And yet the most irritating thing about Javik is how he managed to make her fall in love with him anyway._


	11. Alien

Years ago, Javik would have personally thrown anyone out the airlock who dare suggest he'd one day be joined to an asari.

It's strange, he thinks, here he was pinned between a mattress and the alien soft skin of his mate. Too many fingers, the thoughts continue when she grasps his hand and two of hers have to awkwardly be squeezed together between his. Too few eyes when she opens hers , small and not prothean yellow but a foreign blue.

He can't bring himself to care, and Javik uses his arm as a lever to press Liara closer to him, kissing at her forehead. She gives him a tender smile in exchange, and his other hand finds itself trailing down the curve of her waist and onto her slightly swollen belly. He… he knows there's something special there, though he's only vaguely aware of it. It's not that Liara hasn't told him, if not the wavering scent of her hormonal changes, but it is so over his head, so unfeasible to him, that he simply cannot grasp it.

"My own father died when I was very young," Javik finally answers the unspoken question, his eyes darting back up from his hand to meet hers. "I don't…"

"Shhh," Liara interrupts him, curling into his side and softly rubbing her left leg against his. Her eyes close once she finds a comfortable position - face snug into his shoulder and legs over his - and Javik hums in approval when her slender fingers discover the flesh between the chitinous plates on his chest. "You'll do fine, I promise."

He doesn't quite know why, but he believes her.


	12. Guilt

"I figured that as his employer, you had the right to see these," Maelon says, taking a seat next to Liara and handing her a datapad with what she discerns is Javik's health information. "He doesn't seem to be the kind to take care of himself, unfortunately."

Liara skims through it, not having the time to pick out each and every health issue, and there were many. Most of them were related to what Maelon had brought up earlier; 50,000 years was a long time to be asleep. Even 12,000 would have been a health hazard if his immune system wasn't keeping up with the newly evolving bacteria and viruses. It would be vaccine and treatment after vaccine and treatment. Javik wasn't going to be happy about this.

The last one, however, catches her eye. It's under mental health.

_Possible mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder_.

"Javik has post-traumatic stress disorder?" Liara asks, looking up at the salarian and handing back the datapad.

"Ah yes," Maelon crosses his legs, using his fingers to count. "He seems to exhibit signs, especially of the Avoidance symptoms. Detachment, paranoia, irritability, hypervigilance, insomnia, stoicalness…"

Guilt slides in through her throat and into the pit of her stomach. "I thought…"

"That he was just abrasive?" Maelon's eyes narrow and he leans in, resting his elbows on his thighs. "No."


	13. Solace

"I wish to try again… with you." he says, placing a hand on her cheek and using his thumb to rub at the bridge formed by her freckles. "But I am a broken man, Liara. I do not think I could please you as a mate."

Liara responds by cupping his hand with her own. She can see the fear and pain in his eyes, the fear of a man who had lost everything, even having his own health – both physical and mental – betray him, fear of dragging the one being in the galaxy he has come to love down with him into a hole of despair.

Fear of having something to lose again.

"We've finished your book," Javik drops his hand from her face. His eyes harden slightly and he straightens his back, putting that familiar mask of unemotion back on his face and into his voice. "I have been offered a job as a… military adviser of sorts on Kahje. Perhaps it is for the best that I depart from your life." She just had to say the word, and he would be gone.

But Liara wants none of it, effortlessly shattering Javik's façade when she pulls him back down with her tender blue hands, brushing at his lips with her own. She can feel him letting go of a held-up breath as he hesitantly returns the kiss.

"Stay with me," Liara says, pulling him into an embrace and noticing how his arms shake as he slowly returns it…

* * *

Neither of them sleep that night, they spend it wide awake, their limbs intertwined with the other's. The TV is on, but it was muted hours ago, as Javik and Liara preferring to listen to each other's voices rather than the strangers' on the screen.

Liara tells him about Thessia - before the Reapers - and how beautiful it was, and how beautiful it will once again be. She tells him of her mother's yellow dresses and the warm beaches where she was allowed to dig and search for junk when her passion started to show. The time she went to Palaven and was told by a turian boy how the mountains there rolled forever. When she left to go to university and the newfound feeling of independence being on her own. Having to deal with both the stigma of being a pureblood asari and the expectations of a matriarch mother. She tells him of how Shepard found her in Therum, and all the events and details leading up to the war with the Reapers and the discovery of his pod.

And Javik just listens, offering his hand for her to grip when she recants painful moments of her life, and to caress when she tells of pleasant ones. Many of Liara's experiences are alien to him, and he sometimes has to ask her to explain certain subjects he does not quite understand, but he enjoys it nonetheless. He doesn't have anything to say, nor does he want to, content with the sound of her voice and the feeling of her body nestled in between his arms. Perhaps when they… decide to meld he will understand better.

Liara doesn't pressure him to talk, knowing full well that most of his memories are painful and unpleasant and likely best left to rest. When he's ready to tell her he will, she knows that. He rewards her patience and understanding with a brief description of the comrades he had felt so much pain towards and sorely missed - Valur, Shyen, Kalis, Renata, Xion, Dakor, Murin - and how he met them, but falls into silence as the sunlight bleeds through the windows and onto their skin.

Liara soon falls silent as well, finally asleep with her face buried into the red flesh of Javik's neck, and he realizes that in addition to the numbness crawling up his legs, he's trapped himself in a position where he cannot move without waking her up.

Javik would not be going anywhere.

_Clever woman_, he thinks.


	14. Sleep

Liara can always tell when Javik is having a long string of nightmares. He can't sleep because he's fighting reapers in his dreams and she sees it in his eyes, in his posture, in his attitude, that he's war-weary and tired of battle. She sits on his knee and put her hand on his face, stroking the bags under his eyes with the tip of her thumb and he forsakes eye contact, ashamed or perhaps afraid. Maybe he dreamt of losing her, but Liara does not ask.

She plants a kiss right below Javik's leftmost eye and asks him if he's hungry instead.

* * *

When night falls Javik doesn't find his mate in her bed, but in the spot next to the door where he usually sleeps, waiting for him. He's alarmed and confused and is wondering what she's doing there, but Liara just wordlessly smiles and opens her arm, inviting him down with her.

"What are you doing?" Javik's words are stern, but his arm finds itself snaked around Liara's waist all the same.

"I haven't slept well lately," there's a certain uplift in Liara's voice that is not quite mocking. "So I figured I would join you for once." She grabs the neatly folded blanket beside her, pulling it over Javik and her both. He wonders if she purposefully chose a short one, because the asari has to pull herself over his legs in order for both of them to be properly covered.

Feeling her weight on his thigh and shoulder, and her cool fingers wrap themselves around the hand not occupied by his gun, Javik lets out a small sigh through his nasal cavities. Liara is going to make a habit of this, he knows, but he strokes the back of her hand with his thumb anyway, a warm feeling inhabiting his chest. Perhaps he can allow himself to put his pride away, to accept her help, just for tonight.

It does help, and Liara can tell because Javik rewards her in the morning by making love to her_. I need to do this more often_, she thinks as she wakes up and he kisses her, softly at first and then a bit more intensely as he slips an arm under her knees and carries her to their bed. She swears that, perhaps for only a split second, she saw a smile flash across his lips.

And slowly, but surely, Javik starts to depend less on the comforting grip of his rifle, and more on the soothing hold of her hand.


	15. Thoughts

It seems to happen more and more often, and everything about it disturbs him. Ever since Javik saw into the echo shard, ever since Liara rescued him from certain death in that forgotten graveyard, it's been harder and harder to deny.

He loves her.

An _asari_. A species outside his own. A species that, not too long ago, could not even count. Everything about it is wrong wrong _wrong_. A part of his mind, fed and cultivated by a dead ethnocentrist culture, screams that to him. Screams and screams and screams, tells him that he's a disgrace, a disgusting xenophile, that he would have been better off dead with the scraps of his honor intact.

But he's not dead, he's in this closed and private room with Liara. She's leaning over to her computer, quickly editing what ended up being a text book written between them. And Javik's eyes wander, wander to the curve of her back, the sweep of her crest, the fullness of her lips. Liara lacks the necessary vomerolfactive organs to know, but right now the room is thick and pungent with pheromones, almost heavy on his skin.

Javik could cut the tension, well aware of Liara's attraction to him. It would be swift and easy; He'd get her to shut up about some asinine technicality regarding architectural differences between two clusters, sweeping an arm around her waist and finding out for himself if her lips were really as soft as they looked. If her skin would really mold and press under his fingers. He'd make her gasp his name instead of her usual droning, kiss at her charming freckles that danced when she smiled, and discover if there were other places on her body where he could find them…

"Javik? You're not sick again, are you?"

Her voice brings him back to reality and he bites back an urge to groan at himself. He must have looked like an utter _fool_.

"It's possible."

That wasn't a lie.

He tries to think of the asari back in his cycle, the images he has from shards. He concentrates on one of them, seeing in his mind the blue women huddled around campfires made of river reeds, owning few clothes and even fewer teeth. Entire families stuffed together in those reed huts, vestigial webbing still found between their two-too-many fingers. Miserable faces he could barely tell were blue, caked under layers of mud and filth. Those images had worked well for him, keeping his feelings for Liara at bay, controlled and confined, for twenty years. _Asari, asari, asari_.

But even the best built levees eventually wear down, Javik discovers as Liara's face gets close to his, letting him see up close how different and incongruent from the shards' images she is. Her skin is clean and flawless, she's in possession of all her teeth, her eyes display an intelligence that has outwitted even his on more than one occasion.

He _loves_ her.

Javik's breath weighs on his chest, unaided by how strongly he can smell Liara. Her scent is that of ice and oceans and flowers he has never encountered, but with a spicy undertone that are her pheromones, and that he can almost taste on the tips of his tongue. He swallows.

The prothean's eyes widen when Liara places a hand on his face, her thumb resting just on his left cheekbone.

The tension between the two was nothing short of strangling.

"Do you need to see the doctor? You look uncomfortable."

But Javik is speechless from the intimate contact, and one, two, three seconds go by in silence before Liara realizes what she had done and retreats her hand as if she had touched heated metal, stepping back and looking away from him in shame. She has tried so hard and for so long to keep her feelings from appearing on her face, not wishing to make him uncomfortable as she believes they are doomed to be one-sided, but those things tended to break as they did now.

"I'm… sorry," Liara mumbles, barely above his hearing threshold.

"No, I…" he blinks, not quite knowing what to say or what to do. "I simply lost myself in my own thoughts."

_You would have been put to death for this in the Empire._

"I shall retreat to my quarters, Dr. T'Soni," Javik nods to her politely, even if she's not looking at him. "Perhaps we can finish this tomorrow."

He wonders if he should say something to her as he exits, but he turns around to see that she hasn't budged, her back facing him. She's staring at the hand that made contact with his skin, and he does the same, brushing his cheek with his fingertips.

Javik decides it's better to leave her to her thoughts, as he was leaving to be with his.

There was a lot to think about.


	16. Lost

**This is an AU to the rest of this fic's one-shots/drabbles. It was hard to write and hard to edit, so sorry if the quality is a bit more lacking than usual.**

**I'll post something a bit more cheerful tomorrow.**

* * *

"When we fought the Reapers, the feelings of one soldier did not matter." Javik tells Tali, and even she can tell that there are underlying meanings in his words. Likely she knows, but she says nothing and pretends that he's still talking about Sanctuary.

How could fate be so cruel as to take everything away from you, only to force you to long for something you cannot have?

After his talk with Liara, Javik leaves his hands in the water basin long enough to make them prune. He feels unclean, but no matter how long he washes his hands, how hard he scrubs at them, the residue does not come off.

It never will.

_It does not matter_, Javik repeats to himself in his head. And it doesn't.

* * *

Before the attack on the Cerberus Base, a thought crosses his mind to talk to Liara. He would like to tell her that he has accepted her proposal to write a book together on his people. He remembers that after the Thessia battle, after their argument, Liara gave him a smile. It was… surprisingly pleasant to get that reaction from someone, a long time since he has, and for some reason, he cares.

Javik goes into her quarters, tidy and white and blue just like her, and he notices that the bed has not been used much.

The round VI tells him that she's… busy in the Commander's cabin.

* * *

He doesn't know why he ended up bothering, holding his breath as he almost interrupts an intimate moment between his former commander and the doctor. Javik is forced to wait and watch as Liara and Shepard share a kiss, a forehead bump, a touch of hands that fit perfectly together.

He's in ruins that used to belong to his people, but they feel alien and oppressive to him, and he knows he does not belong.

_What am I doing here?_ Javik thinks as he balls his hands into fists. _What?_

* * *

Liara often will dream of an asari child.

She's full of life in her dreams, zipping around with her arms spread, laughing and giggling as she goes. Finally she'll stop, slumping down tired to the floor as children often do, and will look up at her with an infectious grin, her eyes big and round and yellow like the moons of Urth-Vakor.

Shepard and Liara end up having two beautiful girls together, but she feels confused when they open their eyes for the first time, and the asari mother sees full blue without a trace of yellow moons.

* * *

"What do you plan on doing?" Liara asks him, handing him a datapad that contains all the work they've done together. She now knows everything she needed and wanted to know about his people. She doesn't need him anymore.

Javik honestly has no idea. What will he do? All he knows is that he has to get away from her as soon as he can.

"Perhaps… Kahje."

Javik is many things, but avaricious liar is not one of them. The prothean only lasts a month among the hanar before he cannot stand it anymore, and leaves as quickly as he came.

* * *

A century passes, and of course he gets sick. He's gotten sicker and sicker each year, looking for something he will never be able to find, no matter how hard he's searched, in every tiny corner of the galaxy.

Javik finally lies down against a tree on a planet whose name he can't remember. His fever is running hot and when he coughs into his thinning hand it's wet with his blood.

He chuckles because he's dying.

He's finally dying.

Javik finds his echo shard slid in his armor, one of the few things he can call his own. In the haze of his fever, he realizes that perhaps the peace he was searching for was with him all along.

The old ghosts that the commander warned him not to disturb keep him company. They welcome him, caress him, and give him the direction he has needed.

* * *

Many, many years after Shepard's death, and many more after she had last heard from him, Liara gets a call with his accented voice on the other end. It's easy to recognize it as Javik's, his is not one she could possibly forget.

His words she will never forget either.

"I wish to join them," there is a long pause, Liara immediately knowing who it is, though he sounds like only a shadow of his former self. "My people."

It was as if ice water had been poured on her head.

"Are you… are you sure…?"

"I do not belong here," Javik says. "I do not belong anywhere."

* * *

He looks like a ghost, Liara thinks, his body thin in his armor, the skin of neck dull colored. Even his eyes look slightly glazed over. He speaks like a ghost too, not entirely there as he tells her that she's the only one he trusts with his death and his corpse and how he wants it handled.

"Valur is buried there," Javik points at a spot in the sand. He can remember everything as if it happened the day before and not fifty thousand years ago. "He would use a sword to funnel his biotic powers. He was young, but wise beyond his years."

"Shyen is over there, next to him." The prothean moves to what would be the foot of his grave. "If you had met him outside of battle you would think of him weak, but he was not. Skinny man."

And so Javik continues, telling her of each one of his comrades, all neatly buried next to each other as if in a lineup. However, they both know their bodies have likely decayed to ash at this point. There would be little to be found if they had dug.

Javik finally gets to the last grave, Murin's. He takes a deep breath as he remembers her in this spot. On her knees, hands bound behind her back, indoctrinated eyes glaring up at him. She spits out his name before he shoots her in between the eyes, "_Talassss_."

That name lay dead and buried here with her, never to be spoken again.

"Murin… was my mate. I wish to be laid next to her."

Javik turns around to face Liara, an uncharacteristic softness in his features. His eyes are big and yellow, and her blood turns to ice as she realizes that they are the same yellow of the asari child who has haunted her dreams for decades.

The blood cooly drains from her face as his hand finds itself on her shoulder. They both know now, but it is too late. It is far too late.

Liara leans in to kiss him, holding on to the false hope that it's not too late, that she can stop him, that they can still make asari children with eyes like moons, but Javik pulls away. He is no longer there with her. He never was.

"Perhaps if things had been… different," he says.

They are quiet for a few moments, the wind, and the sand it carries, whistling through what feels like an enormous gap between them. Liara reaches her hand towards him, and Javik… Javik smiles at her. She has never seen him smile.

But she's forced to watch in horror as blood falls on the sand along with his particle rifle, first a few drops, then more. He's still standing, still smiling as crimson red pours from his mouth and down his chin, as the blood falling from the hole in his chest stains his armor and the ground beneath him.

"Thank you," he whispers, and those are his last words to the woman he has loved, that he loves, that he couldn't help himself but love, before the last prothean falls to the ground, dead.

The moons are yellow that night, on the desert of Urth-Vakor.


	17. Communication

"Teach me your language." Liara says sternly, leaning back into his shoulder, her legs entangling with his as they tend to do when they lay like this. He blinks as he realizes that she's serious, staying quiet for a quick heartbeat before speaking his mind.

"I don't think I would be a good teacher," he replies, resting his chin on her head. Javik knows Liara is a stubborn one, and isn't going to let it rest at that. That's one of the reasons he fell in love with her, after all.

"Nonsense, you didn't think you'd make a good scholar either, and look at where we are now."

Her wit was another reason. The prothean gives a sigh of resignment, it would be a tragedy if the language was lost after his death, he may as well give it a try. Slowly, he reaches out around Liara to clasp her hands, rolling his thumbs into the indentation of her palms.

"Finger is_ nguk_," he says softly, moving his head from the top of hers to the side. "In plural it would be _nguke_." Liara repeats after him, the words slow on her lips and barely above a whisper, marveling at her fingers as if she had never seen them before. It's… strangely charming of her to see her so concentrated, he thinks. Perhaps he will enjoy this after all.

"Hand is munei," Javik continues, rocking her hands palm upwards with his. "Plural would be muneie."

"Munyeh," Liara says instead, and Javik chuckles lightly at her mispronunciation. That meant… something else entirely.

"Wrong, _munei_. Say it again."

"_Munei_," Liara repeats with perfect pronunciation. "_Muneie_."

"Good. It appears that you are a fast learner in more than one thing," Javik teases her, and Liara huffs indignantly in response.

"And what is that supposed to mean?" She quips, feigning ignorance and turning her head to face him. It wasn't the first time he had made a smartass remark about her lack of sexual experience prior to their bonding. _Jerk._

"Nothing," Javik replies with a smirk still on his lips, squeezing at her hands and diverting her attention back to them. His own slowly glide up her arms, stopping to rest right above her elbows, and he gives them a light squeeze. "Arm would be _thakil_."

"_Thakil_," Liara parrots, and she places her right hand over his left one.

Sometimes Liara was unsure if she was a bit too clingy on Javik, always making sure to have physical contact with him as far as she could get away with. Perhaps she was afraid that if she blinked, he would be gone.

He had given her reason enough to believe that was a possibility.

"I'm assuming that the plural would be _thakile_?"

"No," Javik's free hand climbs up to her shoulder, and Liara gently pushes the edge of her forehead into his cheek, making sure not to be harsh on the sensitive grooves of his face. She furrows her brows in confusion as he corrects her. "_Thakilis_. I'll instruct you on the grammar later."

She lets out a tiny sigh of relief as she always does when he makes a reference to a later date, because to her it means he will still be there with her another day.

It wasn't as if Javik hadn't reassured her, she made him promise to stay with her, to not leave, but it wouldn't hurt giving him something to do. If he has something to do, something to look forward to the next day, a reason to exist, then he won't die.

He won't die.

Liara doesn't realize she might be squeezing at his hand hard enough for him to notice her distress. Though Javik can already smell the cortisol flowing through her body, he gives her a slight read to confirm her hidden motivations behind asking him to teach her prothean. He doesn't regret telling his mate the truth, it would be dishonest to keep that information from her, but that doesn't ease the sick feeling in his gut whenever she gets like this; afraid, silent, lonely. She gets nightmares about it occasionally, and Javik knows because in the morning she'll just wordlessly hug him, a pensive expression on her face, eyes dull and devoid of that intelligent spark. The same ones she likely had now.

Javik's hands let go of Liara's shoulder and arm, finding their way back to her own hands. They cradle Liara's gently, his fingers interweaving with hers as best as they can allow.

There are no words for "I love you" in the prothean language, such things being communicated well enough through scent, touch, and the sharing of true names that having them would be redundant. But he could tell her something different, something more meaningful.

"_Nkola mumbar, shayen Liara rakundalorkbe_," Javik whispers in her auditory cavity. "_Ojigra katur grolydia, nyagurmbe_."

_You are my reason to exist, I have no other. Bound to you, I cannot leave._

"What was that?" Liara asks, and he's relieved to know that her voice is rid of her melancholy from earlier, replaced by the chime of curiosity he once was foolish enough to think irritating.

"I will teach you someday," Javik tells her, "for now, ba…"

His voice trails off as a new, but familiar scent pulses through the grooves on his face. Now he is the one left perplexed. "You are aroused."

"I…" Liara bites her lip and shifts uncomfortably in Javik's arms, feeling her face burn purple with her blush. _Damn him and his sense of smell_. "You have an attractive voice, _Talas_."

Javik chuckles again, making things worse for the asari by causing the heat on her face to intensify with both additional arousal and annoyance. The latter, though, is cooled over as she feels his lips tenderly kiss at her neck.

"That we can take care of right now."


	18. Minidrabbles

Whenever Liara is feeling stressed - work, or an argument with a friend or Aethyta - Javik always picks it up right away. She's not quite sure if it's pheromones, or love, or both, but he'll notice, putting the palm of his hand to her cheek and lifting her chin up. He'll press his lips together in an almost-smile and tell her he'll finish her work for the day.

* * *

Powerlessness. It's a feeling Javik dislikes - hates even, but he's caught himself staring at her like a stupefied imbecile whenever she tosses him one of those coy grins of hers, and he realizes that's exactly what he feels around Liara. Strangely enough, he does not mind.

* * *

Liara listens to Javik give a lecture to her students, filling in for her as her voice is robbed by a cold. She wonders if she's the only one in the room who finds the sound of his voice and his eyes somewhat hypnotizing, and thinks _I might just be starting to fall in love with you, Javik._

* * *

"I am not an insect!" Javik hisses as Liara chases him away from the fish tank with a bug repellent spray. It's the third time this month.

* * *

_Hey, Buggy, finally settling down with the Doc, huh?_

The first time James Vega asks his prothean bud that question, Javik seems almost revolted, glaring at him venomously as his upper lip curls in his usual disgruntled sneer.

"There is _nothing_ between me and the _asari_."

But James gets the last laugh when a smooth, but slightly strained voice comes up behind them, and Javik's expression quickly falls to what James imagines is an insect's about to hit a windshield.

"Oh, so I'm back to being the asari now?"

The second time James asks Javik that question, there is a tiny blue child in the prothean's arms, and he can only huff indignantly in response.

* * *

"I was gone for fifteen minutes!" Liara yells, jumping over Javik's unconscious form, and miraculously catching a biotically unstable toddler. Mere seconds more and Ilnara would have charged right out the window.

* * *

_Mating between species was punishable by death in the Empire_, a tiny voice nags in Javik's mind as he feels Liara's thighs squeeze at his waist, her fingers curl around his shoulder plates, her lips press against his neck.

And yet, he cannot bring himself to care.

* * *

Blue is somewhat of a foreign color to Javik.

He's not accustomed to the color blue, more acquainted with the skies red-lit by the beams of the Reapers. Used to the neon green of biotic flashes, dwarfed by the lights of ferocious orange fires. Used to the gray of decayed buildings and structures as they crumble and crack and fall. Used to the black ash and smoke falling and encircling his being in both sights and smell and the knowledge that not all of it is from the buildings. He's used to the death-brown of corpses and husks and the crunch of chitin beneath his feet. The prothean still hears it, still feels that same crunch today at times, and he'll remove his foot and scan the ground for a corpse only to realize it was just poorly maintained cement or an old worn tile.

(_Post-traumatic stress disorder_, the salarian doctor says, typing up his prescription. _Cultural differences_, Javik says, throwing the medication out an eighty story window)

He's not used to blue, Javik thinks when he looks upwards from his pod on what those in the current cycle call Eden Prime, and sees blue skies and the bluer face of an asari woman. Blue means there are no Reapers, no firestorms of war and death consuming as far as the eye can see. Blue means that there is peace and hope for the future.

And Javik sees it best on Liara's smiling lips, on the freckles that dance across her face, on her hand as she takes his in hers and promises him a purpose, a future, a life away from red-ravaging flames and suffocating smoke and killing and death.

It's such a strange, alien concept to him, but he'll gladly welcome it if it's with her.


	19. Kiss

_**BAM!**_

Liara twirled two heatsinks in her hand, looking out of cover and turning her head to scan the nearby area. She listened for any noises, any sign that there may still be another eclipse mercenary hidden between the artificial hills created by an illegal dig site. While she was comforted by the fact that there was unlikely to be any mercs left alive now, experience had taught her not to let her guard down, and she was quick to reload her gun just in case another suicidal troop marched in.

A curt grunt pulled her attention back to her side, emitted by an injured prothean holding his shoulder, a grimace – more pronounced than usual – on his face. Blood, dark red in color, dripped down his arm and made it clear to Liara as to why. There was a bullet entry hole in the space between the segments of his armor, one of the mercenaries had gotten lucky.

"You were shot?" Liara asked incredulously, fumbling with her omnitool to access the medi-gel dispensary as she knelt down to be at his level. After surviving countless battles with Reapers years earlier, it was very rare for either of them to get caught off guard by the two-bit mercenaries that plagued prothean dig sites.

"No," Javik said. "I was stung by an insect when I wasn't looking."

Liara didn't think it was possible for her eyes to hurt from rolling them so hard, but ultimately decided against arguing. She dabbed the cool gel against Javik's wound, but he hissed in pain and jerked his arm away out of reflex. It cost him though, the extra movement caused him to wince as the torn muscles were forced to move, and his legs stretched and his feet dug into the layer of dust beneath him.

"I do not need the slime."

"Don't be stubborn," Liara said with considerably less patience. "We both know you are prone to infections, and I'm not going to let you get sick again if I can help it." This time the asari managed to pry Javik's fingers away from his shoulder – glad that he didn't have that many – and pressed the medigel into the bleeding area with less gentleness than she had originally started out with. He grunted in protest, but Liara ignored him. He had it coming anyway, the jerk.

"Maybe you can help moving when a sniper's laser is on your forehead instead," Javik glared, grabbing onto Liara with the hand of his uninjured arm. "Then maybe I would not get shot pushing you out of the- hngh."

Oops, Liara may have applied a little bit too much pressure than necessary. It wasn't completely on purpose. Not entirely.

"You are rude, arrogant, prideful," the asari pouted, focusing on pushing the gel into the entry wound. "Xenophobic, insufferable, stubborn in your ways, and sometimes I honestly don't know…" Her voice trailed off as she finished and looked up to notice how Javik had closed the distance between their faces, and only a quick glance was exchanged before their lips met.

For a few moments it was silent, save for the small noises of their mouths joining and then separating.

"You are right," Javik chuckled at Liara's stunned silence, leaning backwards and away from his bondmate. "That does work."

"Hmph," Liara's eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together in a frown, but her hand found itself on Javik's good arm, which had not let go of hers yet. "Keep that thought up and I'll shoot you myself."


	20. Glyph

That was _it_.

Javik was tired of this petulant dancing around, the thick heavy tension in the air compounded by pheromones, heavy on his skin every time he saw her. He knew Liara felt it too, despite her lack of vomerolfactive sense. The way her fingers uncurled when she reached out towards him just so subtly when she wished to comfort him, to touch him, before moving back to her chest or sides at her hesitation, spoke it all.

And now the asari was doing it again, but now she was doing it with that _thing_. That _thing_ she did where her eyes slowly trailed upwards to meet his, her lips then curving into a smile that always left him stunned still for a few seconds like a salarian with lights shone in his eyes.

He was tired of it, he was tired of it when he finally grabbed Liara by the shoulders and pulled the surprised asari in towards him.

"We need to speak," there was impatience in Javik's voice that marked it urgent. "About a personal matter."

"What… is it?"

And that's when Javik remembered that he is not a man of words, at least not when it came to these matters, because he cannot begin to describe the way he yearns for her touch on the skin of his neck, or how her blue eyes and silk voice haunt him in his sleep. Nor can Javik properly speak of how much Liara meant to him, the hell that is his life in this cycle only tolerable because he could look forward to seeing her flustered look after he teased her, her concentrated brows as she rattled on about something he ordinarily wouldn't care about, the softening of her eyes when she thanked him for putting up with her constant questions he had been foolish enough to think of as irritating at some point in time.

So he did the only thing he could do, which was to slowly close the distance between her face and his, and…

"Doctor T'Soni, you have received an urgent message from Operative Feron."

Javik had no idea who this Operative Feron was, but the avatar of vengeance swore in his mind he would find him and kill him in a true prothean manner.

_After_ he was done with the machine.

* * *

**A/N: Sorry about the lack of updating guys, but I've been kind of in limbo ever since the Citadel DLC pretty much destroyed a lot of my headcanons for this ship and thus a lot of the fics in here hahaha! I guess it was worth it to have canon confirmation that Javik has romantic inclinations towards Liara though!**

**I might work on a short multichapter fic in the future though, if anybody is interested. :)**


	21. Cute

The words cute, nor adorable, were anywhere to be found in Javik's dictionary.

They were not words he would have used to describe his daughter when he first held her in the crook of his arm, enveloped in a red blanket with a white lace at its edges. Her eyes were round and wide and vibrant-green as she sized him up, making little gurgling noises between the three tiny fingers she had stuffed in her mouth.

They were not words he would have used to describe her when Liara ropes him into sitting down and inducing the tiny asari to speak. He feels like an imbecile at first, saying the same words over and over again for hours while the baby becomes distracted with the sauce of her food, or the faux fur of her toy ("in my cycle, that would have been a real stuffed varren"). Until one day she stares at Javik intently, lips pursed in concentration, and says a word that only very roughly approximates the prothean term for father.

And yet it's enough to make him grin like a lunatic and yell for Liara, boasting that she spoke his native language first and not hers, as if it mattered.

"I'll get the next one," she laughs.

"Next one?" He asks.

Nor would Javik use them to the sight of his younger daughter's yellow eyes , wet and half-mooned when he scolds her about her irresponsible use of biotics. ("I do not like salarians either, but you cannot detonate biotic explosions on them. Yes, even if it is only to make them fall. No, it was not funny.") She whimpers and falls into a sob that eclipses her eyes with her hands, which brings his voice to a halt. Javik sighs and tells the girl that if she promises to behave, he will buy her human ice cream.

No, they were not there at all.


	22. Mischief

"Don't do that," Janiri's eyes narrow as she hears the small pop of Ilnara taking the cap off a marker. A few small indentations on the ridged plastic marked her sister's teeth, clearly visible when she lets it roll out of her mouth and drop into her small purple hand. "Papa will get mad."

"You're a dumb tattle-teller," Ilnara whispers, not wanting to get caught before she did anything. The younger asari child tests the waters by wiggling a small cloud on the top part of her father's crest, her pensmanship delicate as to require the least bit disturbance to the sleeping prothean.

"Ilnara…" Janiri repeats, crossing her arms, her chin up, mouth curved into a prideful pout. The named responds by writing _Janiri is a dummy_ next to the cloud.

"I'm telling moooom!" The older child whines as soon as she notices her sister's intent, and Ilnara almost gasps when their father stirs as Janiri's stomps echo and then fade away.

She then makes sure to add a very cramped _big_ between _a_ and _dummy_.

Ilnara manages to get away with ten hearts, five doodles of thresher maws in various states of emotions, and two more crude insults (likely learned from her grandfather) directed at Janiri when her mother walks in guided by her sister, catching her red handed, the marker in her hand and some black stains that somehow managed to take her cheeks as collateral damage.

"Uhm," her eyes go big and yellow and wide. "It wasn't my fault."

Her mother starts to laugh, failing trying to muffle it by covering her mouth with her hand. She has a hard time going between her thoughts of impatience of Ilnara doing something she shouldn't have, or how hilarious Javik looks with childish drawings on his face, and how it was strange he hasn't woken up yet. A poor sleeper, it wasn't like him to sleep through this unless… goddess!

Liara has to move Ilnara quickly to press her hand against her husband's cheek and confirm her suspicions, smudging some of her daughter's artwork in the process. Fever again. But not too high. She sighs in relief, though it would still be a good idea to get the doctor to see him, as unpleasant as the experience usually is for all of them.

A few minutes later, Doctor Maelon sighs somewhat less placidly as he walks into the scene of his prothean patient grumbling and glaring at nothing, with his wife cleaning marker off his face. The salarian shakes his head, he definitely does not get paid enough to deal with irritable graffitid protheans.


	23. Gullible

**Midnight Lion: I'd really like to know what made you dislike this ship? Perhaps we can discuss it and I can try to change your mind? Hehe**

**Written in response to a picture a friend drew for me**

** post/54646398140/reyairia-geihinnom-a-little-belat ed-birthday**

* * *

"That is not how prothean reproduction worked."

Liara removed her hands from the holographic interface, her lips pursed. She figured this topic of conversation would have to come up eventually, as hard as she tried to sidestep it.

"You told me your species had males and females, I just-"

"Jumped to conclusions again?"

About five different insults, and three different threats sprung to the asari's mind to fling back back at the insufferable being behind her, but she had to admit he was right.

"All right," Liara rested her hands on her hips as she rotated herself to face the prothean. He had the usual scowl on his face, and she really wondered if he was even trying to change that. "How different was it from the species of the current cycle?"

Javik crossed his arms, his eyes unblinking. "We donated genetic material to a reproduction grub that combined the best genes from our DNA and laid eggs from the result."

Liara's eyes widened, her scientific curiosity taking over her annoyance. "Really?"

"Yes."

Her mind reeled at the implications, and she found herself pacing and thinking out loud. "That is fascinating. I can only imagine the sociocultural implications! Lack of intimacy between different genders may have implied a state of gender equality. The lack of relationship between parents and their children would explain why the Protheans were so resilient in war if they did not feel connected to their children and thus worried about their future. It may also explain in part the tendency towards biotechnology - of course once you get past the distaste for AI and…"

Javik's chuckle interrupted her monologue, and Liara felt her face flush hot purple at the realization, before turning her head in the direction of the arrogant prothean.

"You will believe _anything_." Javik had the biggest smirk she had seen so far on him.

It was promptly smacked off his face


	24. Gift

It was a piano that would put Anderson's to shame, Liara thought to herself as her fingers traced from the first to last keys, calling back the song taught to her by a colleague many decades ago. Her fingers landed at the middle and pressed down on the first note, the second following as she approved of the sound humming through the wood. _Real_ wood, Liara noted, recognizing it as a Sur'Keshian native, which was additionally embedded with enough element zero to make the dark color glisten blue under the artificial light. The keys were not overshadowed either, being composed of nathak ivory and whose tint matched the sheen of the wood. Liara pressed down a third key, wondering to herself how the luxurious item had appeared in her living room.

"Mind telling me how this got here?" The asari turned her head to catch a prothean in the corner of her eye. His arms were crossed as he leaned against the wall that separated two rooms, and his lips were pressed in his usual frown. Javik broke eye contact with her almost immediatly, deciding instead to face the large window that framed the expanse of space.

"It was a gift from one of our agents."

Liara brought her eyes back to the keys, humming the tune as she played it out on the piano. There was no excuse not to properly learn now, and she could use a hobby to distract herself from the workload of being the shadow broker. She smiled. It was a good gift.

"Do you honestly expect me to believe that?"

There was silence for a few seconds, though not an uncomfortable one, before Javik's chuckle and footsteps finally broke it.

"You are learning."

"No thanks to you," Liara retorted, but her voice was smooth as she let her head fall onto her bondmate's shoulder.


End file.
